Ultima™ Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams

From the onset of the title screen, you can tell that Martian Dreams (MD) was made with love and endless ideas that were not suited for the mainstream Ultima games. MD have two faces: 1) the world, and 2) the gameplay. All love went into building the worlds. Unfortunately, the gameplay falls flat. MD has a great world. All science fiction classics, like Mars, aliens, robots, and dream worlds (yes, the title “Martian Dreams” was well chosen), are skillfully intertwined into the story. All characters are based on late 19th century real people and part of believable communities. For example, Emma Goldman was a champion of women rights in real life with anarchistic ideas, in game she finds herself in the hands of a destructive evil bent on creating anarchy. I didn’t enjoy the gameplay, however. At first it feels like a Fallout game, with scraping together a few bullets to shotgun alien creatures. So far so good, but soon I tried to outrun those same aliens as battles were more a drain on bullets than something vital to the game. The quests are one long sequence of fetch quests, which are also not always clear. You can run around the planet a few times before you find what you need or you cannot find the single trigger word that advances the story. Also, besides the story line, there is nothing to do except maybe try out an alien gun on a cactus. MD has very little to offer in terms of game mechanics. You can find berries that are supposed to give you psychic powers, but besides the need to move a plank for a quest, there is no real use for them. Your characters can feel cold and lack of oxygen. Unfortunately, these mechanics are also not well flashed out. You avoid cold by sleeping when it gets dark and oxygen deprivation has only a minor effect on your stats. There are exceptions, like the need for pliers to pick up radioactive stuff. Overall, I think MD has a fantastic story, but the gameplay is more for fans of old text based adventure games (which I’m not).

An Excellent way of becomming acustomed to some of histories most iconic academics, considering the game is free of charge props must be given to gog.com. Gog.com is truely a respectful and honest Buisness model.

I still have the original box for this - back in the day, it was my absolute favorite game ever, as it improved on Savage Empire in almost every way; it's also stood the test of time much better, and I've actually replayed it three or four times since - a lot for me, usually when I'm done with a game, I'm done. I think only Wasteland would beat this in the "best old-school RPG from my childhood"-category. That top five would be: 1: Wasteland 2: Martian Dreams 3: Savage Empire 4: Ultima 7 5: Pool of Radiance Yes, I mean old-school old-school.

An amazing game off beat addition to the Ultima line using the, at the time, groundbreaking Ultime 6 engine. Also of note is this being an early work of Warren Spector of Deus Ex and Epic Mickey fame.